CINDY Sheehan, a 48-year-old resident of Vacaville, California, has been holding a vigil outside of the ranch in Crawford, Texas where George W. Bush in enjoying a five-week vacation. She wants to confront him about his lack of concern for young people from the United States who are dying in Iraq, and ask why his own daughters do not go fight.

Sheehan, whose son died in combat on April 4, 2004, five days after arriving in Iraq, is part of a group of relatives of soldiers who have been killed in that Arab nation, Gold Star Families for Peace, which is mobilizing to demand that the troops come home. For some weeks, her statements had been reflected in U.S. media reports: “My son wasn’t killed in Iraq, he was killed by this government and its lies...The other day, the president said that the soldiers’ sacrifice had been for a noble cause. I want to ask him. Why was my son killed? What was the noble cause that he died for?”

Referring to the main justification for the invasion – that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction – she affirmed, “All of those reports show that my son died needlessly,” and that “the reasons that George Bush gave us for going to war were wrong.”

According to press reports, every day more people are joining Cindy’s demand, and some 40 Democratic members of Congress to ask Bush to talk to her.

The latest Gallup poll this past week revealed that 57% of those surveyed in the United States believe that the invasion of that Persian Gulf nation has made their country less safe.

Bush’s statement from his ranch that “We will stay the course, we will finish the job in Iraq” enraged some veterans of the war in Iraq who had gathered at a Veterans for Peace convention. Some of that organization’s members deserted, arguing that they had emotional disorders so that they would not have to return.

Marine Corporal Abdul Henderson commented with respect to the president’s statement: “I see this guy in the most prestigious office in the world, and this guy says ‘bring it on.’ A guy who ain’t never been shot at, never seen anyone suffering, saying ‘bring it on?’ He gets to act like a cowboy in a western movie “We were firing into small towns... you see people just running, cars going, guys falling off bikes¼. You just sit there and look through your binos (binoculars) and see things blowing up, and you think, man they have no water, living in the third world, and we're just bombing them to hell. Blowing up buildings, shrapnel tearing people to shreds.” Another soldier adds, “Most of what we're talking about is war crimes¼war crimes because they are directed by our government for power projection.”

Henderson’s response, in order to not return, was to claim Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome, but, he admits: “the deeper, moral reason is that I didn’t want to be involved in a crime against humanity.”

Those soldiers also included Camilo Mejía, a U.S. Army sergeant sentenced to one year in a military prison for refusing to return and fight. During the convention, the young man admitted publicly: “I killed civilians, I tortured guys¼. Once you are there, it has nothing to do with politics¼¼it has to do with you as an individual being there and killing people for no reason. There is no purpose, and now I'm sick at myself for doing these things.”

According to Mejía, when he returned to Iraq from leave in October of 2003, there were 22 cases of desertion. Five months later, there were 500, and when he got out of prison, there were 5,000. He pointed to the increase of desertion within five months: “These are the Pentagon’s figures.”

After discussing how the background radiation in Baghdad is now five times above normal, Charlie Anderson, another veteran, stated, “These are not accidents – the DU [Depleted Uranium] – it's important for people to understand this – the use of DU and its effects are by design. These are very carefully engineered and orchestrated incidents.”

For his part, Harvey Tharp, who fought in Kirkuk, noted, “We, as Americans, have to face the total obvious truth that this was all because of a lie....We want to help other vets tell other vets their story¼”

“I didn’t want to kill another soul for no reason,” Henderson said.

Artillery Corporal Alex Ryabov, who was in Iraq during the first three months after the invasion, says that he doesn’t think that Bush “will ever realize how many millions of lives he and his lackeys have ruined on their quest for money, greed and power.”

Ryabov also referred to how his unit had fired artillery rounds which hit 5-10 kilometers from their intended target. “We have no idea where those rounds fell, or what they hit,” he said, adding, “Now we've come to these realizations and we're trying to educate people to save them from going through the same thing.”

The soldier explained that more than 2,200 tons of uranium munitions have been used thus far. “We were put in a foreign country to fire artillery and kill people¼and it shouldn't have even happened in the first place... I feel a grave injustice has been done and I'm trying to correct it. You do all these things and come back and think, ‘what have we done?’”

Many citizens opposed to the war, including the Veterans for Peace, seem hopeful about the resurgence of an anti-war movement similar to that during the war on Viet Nam. How many more U.S. soldiers must die?

Granma Int

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